Jumping and Flanking

As usual, Asher is quite the roller coaster ride. I can go from very discouraged to very optimistic about his jumping within 5 minutes. With how he had been jumping I was not looking forward to this week’s league course which had SEVEN backsides – ugh. And our first run, he was just terrible, looked terrible, was refusing jumps – not good at all. Gave him a break, ran Byrn – fired Bryn – and then took Asher out again for his ‘official’ run. And he was fine, not one stutter, no refusals, no weird jumping at all. So … WTF? Now, I was supporting things like crazy (which made the course way harder than it needed to be), but some of the jumps I just couldn’t get there for (since I had to babysit things!), and he was fine. So … huh.

Then we had jumping seminar with Fanny Gott. Which turned out basically to be a problem solving session for whatever issues you were having with your dog. This was Asher’s first time in this location, turf, and he actually wasn’t awful, he did some stuttering and hesitation, but Fanny said that it was preferable to just launching and flinging (which is what a lot of other dogs were struggling with). The exercises we did to help him were super simple and straightforward, which was basically just putting down a toy target, making the angle easier and then working back to where he was having the issue. And that worked! He got a lot more confident and much less awkward with his jumping. She didn’t see any early jumping issues, she felt it was just confidence. So huh.

The other thing we worked on was collection, and I liked the feedback I got there. We had been working on rewarding Asher for coming into me right before the jump with a toy, which he could do – but Fanny just had me ask for a nose touch with the opposite arm right in front of the jump, and it was hilarious Asher’s reaction to that. He started BARKING, and he NEVER barks in agility! So that was actually very effective in getting the collection consistently, and much more than using a toy target, though apparently much harder for Asher to use that little brain. Now, all that is assuming I’m going to be anywhere near where I actually need the collection, but it’s a start.

We also played around with a little handling, and it’s always interesting to tryout different handling styles. She basically uses whatever arm to cue a jump to turn that direction, so even if the dog is on your right, if you want the dog to jump left (but with no side change), you cue it with your left arm (in this case offside arm), so that was super awkward to me, but the dogs certainly did seem to understand it. I’ll play around with it, the tricky part being having already trained off arms to mean a threadle – but Asher had been fine working off arms for collection training, so hey.

It was just novel to actually be at a seminar and working on things. After the disaster we had at our last seminar with Asher’s confidence with sequencing with backsides we’re obviously still not ready to do any handling stuff, but it was fun to be learning again. So expensive though, and this was particularly expensive, and advertised as 4 hours, but we only did 3, or not even three since they started late. I might look into some of Fanny’s online stuff though, I do love a good trainer.

As for our own training, both dogs have had good stuff and bad stuff. I now have Bryn in TWO classes a week, just for the remainder of this session. We often have to stop, when Bryn gets something in her head it’s very hard to get her out of that ‘mode’, like with the weavepole entry thing the other week we had to just go back and completely retrain. Then I could not get that girl to come in to me, not with her name, recall, bypass, hand touch – NOTHING, she would not do it. So I had to get some toy targets just to get her to come off a line that she was DETERMINED to take. She did some great obstacle discrimination, weavepoles look solid again, she’s getting better with threadles at speed (which require ‘anti-flanking’, so super hard!). Pushes are looking better too. Not super happy with contacts, went back and worked on everything. Getting jumpy on her dogwalk again, not missing, but very much going UP instead of forward or down on her last stride. Aframe had to go back and get her back to coming down as deeply as I’d like – and the driving all the way to the end of the teeter, she was stopping about half a body length short. Her turns and collection continue to feel so novel, and she’s doing really well with left and right, which is also something I’m not used to actually using. Right now she tends to do really well about 50% of the time with things, which I’m taking as progress. So, so flanky though …

For AKC league this week she was just being a dork, popping weavepoles, jumping contacts, dropping bars, refusing to do backsides even if I was drop kicking her into them – so, yeah, fired. And let it be said, nothing negative is happening, but when she gets into that ‘mode’ I know to just let it go and try again later – and sometimes you don’t get another later! Seven backsides was too much, apparently. I love that little dog, and she loves her agility and gets more and more into it all the time. Definitely making forward progress, but she’s still a baby in agility, that’s for sure. I know the answer, need to keep going back to foundation behaviors – many of which she CAN do … but without speed. Speed definitely kills for the little flanky thing.

And, yes, Navarre gets to play too – no issues with him, it’s so weird to be able to actually do things with him. Almost 8 year old dogs have an advantage, that’s for sure. And I’ve found Navarre a new handler! Martine is such a nice handler, and so fit and aggressive with her handling, Navarre just LOVES her. And right now she could use another dog to run, so we’ll see how it goes. I’m going to enter him in the UKI trial, which means revisiting some backsides – which he hasn’t done in years. Definitely rusty. I don’t want to overdo it, there was a reason I stopped doing international with him – but, knock on wood, I haven’t seen any issues with his back for at least a year, maybe longer? Now, maybe that’s BECAUSE he’s not doing backsides, so we’ll see. We’re still going to keep it to a minimum, but it made him SO HAPPY. His eyes were still totally dialated like 10 minutes later. Navarre is the community dog, he gets around.

Winter continues to be going on forever, I’ve never had such a long, cold winter in Oregon before. Wet, yes, but not with this level of cold – it’s been since NOVEMBER. Oregon should have 6 weeks of winter, not 4 months! Still, I also have been feeling a little off, and being more cold even inside is one of those – getting my thyroid checked, I’ve been not quite myself for a while now. We shall see, maybe it’s just the WINTER THAT NEVER ENDS.